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- 53 Chapter Five AN UNWAVERING COMMITMENT Founded in New York by both blacks and whites in 1909, the NAACP was more than of symbolic importance to African Americans in the South during much of the Jim Crow era. The organization’s significance to blacks can hardly be overestimated. Even in places like Arkansas where the organization had few branches, blacks like Daisy Bates’s foster father counted themselves as members and sent in contributions to the national office.1 Though in its initial years the NAACP had a reactive litigation strategy, that would change in the 1930s with the arrival of Charles Houston, an African American graduate of Harvard Law School.2 Houston and his student Thurgood Marshall began to formulate and implement a plan of attack that was designed to force the South eventually into giving up segregated schools as well as the other vestiges of Jim Crow.3 Focusing the legal work merely highlighted the NAACP’s need for further organizational growth in the South. The establishment of the Arkansas State Conference of Branches in the 1940s reflected a recognition by the NAACP’s national office that from an organizational perspective, the state was moving forward, but soon thereafter, Walter White, now executive director, and his staff believed they had just opened a can of worms. The way the national office would handle the “mess in Arkansas” reflected its own uncertainty as to how militant an organization the NAACP should be, both on the national and local levels. It would be a problem that would surface again and again. In 1945 the national office gave the hard-charging Harold Flowers the job of “chief organizer of branches” but countenanced the election of Rev. Marcus Taylor, a far more conservative man, as president. By so doing, the national office was unwittingly inviting a fight over the direction of the NAACP in the state. Taylor charged Flowers with “keeping half of the funds collected from . . . the branches for himself.”4 The national office confirmed that Flowers was slow sending in the money, but that was as far as it was willing to go after an investigation of the matter. For his part, Flowers contended that Taylor wanted to do nothing more than send dues collected from Arkansans to New York.5 In 1948 Flowers went head to head with the older man and beat him. Seeing that a new day in the organization was possible, that same year Bates tried an end run around the Little Rock branch (also headed by Rev. Taylor) by seeking to form a new NAACP branch in Pulaski County. Armed with “fifty membership subscriptions, plus the branch founding fee,” she nominated herself as president. In her letter of December 9, 1949, she added a postscript: “Atty. Flowers State President is working with us.”6 It was a battle the national office did not want. Gloster B. Current, who would come to know Bates well in future years as the director of branches, wrote her that Little Rock already had a chapter. “On checking the addresses of these members, we find that forty-two of them live in Little Rock.”7 New converts should join the existing organization. Still, Current would have had to have been impressed with Bates’s aggressiveness at the same time as he was charmed by her. As she would tell Jet in 1957, her father had raised her to be a lady, and her femininity was a part of her arsenal. In March 1949 she had appeared in a fashion show on the stage of the Dunbar High School auditorium. How this aspect of her psyche contributed to the growing recognition that she was a woman to be reckoned with in the larger world is straightforward enough. She radiated tastefulness and dignity. She was also married to a man who was constantly pointing out the inadequacy of black leadership but didn’t have the personality or inclination to step forward and demand to be a leader himself. Given the incessant drumbeat of the State Press and her growing sense of herself as a person who was capable of holding her own in what was traditionally a man’s domain, in retrospect, it seems inevitable that Daisy Bates would make the most of any opportunities that would come her way. Meanwhile, the pot continued to be stirred by Flowers, who had persuaded more than 4,000 blacks to join the NAACP in his home base of Pine Bluff. Never happy with the...

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